I’m currently working on a longer piece about joining a bougie gym and the draw towards luxury even while recognizing I’m a cog in the machine of capitalism. It’s taking me longer—I’m grading finals for my summer course and we’re planning a bathroom reno (!!!)—so in the meantime, I wanted to share with you a recently-read essay that I’ve read three times and can’t stop thinking about it.
If you care at all about abortion, this is a must-read. One of the things I appreciated was the thorough overview of the history of abortion and how it became a religious sin and then a crime (hint—capitalism!).
Is Abortion Sacred? is by Jia Tolentino, one of my absolute favorite writers. I stumbled across her work a few years ago when she wrote about how/why TikTok is so addicting (I didn’t have an account for TikTok at the time—I didn’t even know what it was— but the opening paragraph is amazing and so I read the whole long piece in one sitting). Since then I’ve read just about everything I can get my hands on. Her collection of essays, Trick Mirror, is fascinating, hilarious, insightful. One of the things I appreciate about her is ability to critique something and acknowledge her complicity.
I’ve spent the past couple of decades reading and studying the works mostly of writers older than me but Tolentino is about my age. She’s a writer I’m excited to follow—honestly, I feel like she’s my favorite musician, and I’m just looking forward to what she comes out with next.
ANYWAY! Enough fan-girling. Is Abortion Sacred? is from the New Yorker (where she is on staff) and in it she tries to answer that question. She explores her own background (she grew up evangelical in a pro-life world) as well as the history of abortion and the implications of having children in our current state of the world—she makes the case that that is actually our moral quandary. It’s just so good, y’all. Here are some of my favorite passages:
“Even within the course of the same pregnancy, a person and the fetus she carries can shift between the roles of lover and beloved, host and parasite, vessel and divinity, victim and murderer; each body is capable of extinguishing the other, although one cannot survive alone. There is no human relationship more complex, more morally unstable than this.”
And
“It’s been years since I traded the echo chamber of evangelical Texas for the echo chamber of progressive Brooklyn, but I can still sometimes feel the old world view flickering, a photographic negative underneath my vision.” (ISN’T THAT WRITING SO GOOD??)
And
“What multiplied my commitment to abortion were the beautiful things about motherhood: in particular, the way I felt able to love my baby fully and singularly because I had chosen to give my body and life over to her. I had not been forced by law to make another person with my flesh, or to tear that flesh open to bring her into the world; I hadn’t been driven by need to give that new person away to a stranger in the hope that she would never go to bed hungry. I had been able to choose this permanent rearrangement of my existence. That volition felt sacred.”
I could go on and on. Read it. Please. And then call me so we could talk about it.
Here’s the link again:
Is Abortion Sacred? by Jia Tolentino